Che Jim: Think of a place that's important to you. Maybe it’s a lake where you played as a kid, or a field that glitters at dusk, or a neighbourhood where you know every street by heart. 

Now, imagine that connection you feel goes even deeper. Imagine it's embedded in your language, your relative stories, your traditions, and it's a connection stretching back generations, longer than anyone can remember. 

That's just a taste of what it means when Native Americans talk about being connected to a place. 

Hi, I'm Che Jim, and this is Crash Course: Native American History. 

[Theme music]

When Native Americans talk about a connection to a place, it usually goes a lot deeper than "I'm from LA," or "I'm from Chicago." 

Many Native nations, like the Yuki of what’s now California, have continuously lived in the same place for thousands of years.

Others, like the Cherokee, still feel connected to their homeland, even though they no longer live there.

The Cherokee lived for generations in what’s now the south-eastern United States, until the 19th century, when the federal government violently removed them from those lands and forced them to move to present day Oklahoma. 

But this connection is about more than just the physical land.

Like, yeah, it's made of trees and rocks, but also water, sky, other plants, and animals, forces like thunder and wind, seasons and stars. Natives view these elements as part of a living, breathing whole that humans aren't separate from. 

And this worldview stretches across different native nations and cultures. 

The Potawatomi of what’s now the Great Lakes region, often described the land as Emingoyak, which means that which has been given to us.

It's a phrase that invokes every life-sustaining thing the land holds thats offered up for free. Sunlight, water, food, shelter, and medicine. The idea that the land tajes care of you and in return you take care of it.

I think Robin Wall Kimmerer, a Potawatomi botanist, said it best: "Land was everything: identity, the connection to our ancestors, the home of our nonhuman kinfolk, our pharmacy, our library, the source of all that sustained us... it belonged to itself; it was a gift, not a commodity, so it could never be bought or sold". 

She's got bars. 

And we see this perspective in many native traditions. 

Like, every June on the coast of what’s now Washington, salmon emerge from the ocean and swim into the freshwater rivers.

The coastal Swinomish people describe this as a sacred agreement. Salmon come into the rivers, offering themselves as food for people.

But in return, people must care for salmon by cleaning the rivers, greeting the first salmon, and returning that salmon's bones back to the water. 

And every year during the First Salmon Ceremony, that's exactly what coast Salish people do, gathering to sing, dance, and pray, to hold up their end of the bargain. 

Or like, some tribes in what's now California weave baskets from native grasses, twigs, roots and ferns. The designs they create tell traditional stories of their homeland. 

To this day, people who practise this tradition literally weave their ties to the land into their creations. 

Many native languages also reveal these close ties with nature. Lushootseed, for example, is spoken by many coast Salish tribes from the area that’s now called Puget Sound. 

These groups share the perspective that every part of the land has a voice and often it's called its own name.

Like, that's kaka, Crow.

There's stuləkw, which means river, that comes from the sound of water pouring over rocks.

And x̌wəlč, which means Saltwater, and calls to mind waves washing up on the beach.

So sometimes native languages sound like the land but often they share ideas about the land too.

Like the word Onaabani-giizis in the Ojibwe language is one way to refer to the month of March, but it really refers to the hard crust on the snow moon, the moon or month where the top layer of the snow melts during the day and then freezes at night. 

Or when the Haudenosaunee count from 1 to 10, they're not just counting, they're also telling their story of how the land came into existence and reaffirming their ties to it. 

Like the word for one is also the word for Skywoman, who arrived first in their creation story. The word for two refers to Skywoman's daughter, who came next. And the word for three refers to Skywoman's daughter and her twin grandsons. 

All these connections exist on a mind-blowing time-scale, so ancient it's often described as since time immemorial. In other words, so long ago it's before any record or memory.

I'm talking about connections that go all the way back to Native Americans' ancestors ancestors ancestors ancestors ancestors ancestors ancestors ancestors.... [fade out, snap back in] ancestor! They've had thousands of years to simmer. 

The U.S. origin story often makes it seem like Europeans stumbled on an untamed wilderness and that it was fine, noble even, to claim this barely touched place, but that just wasn't true.

North America was very much occupied. 

[Colonial Carl takes over an office, makes himself comfortable, picks up a plaque]

Colonial Carl: John Green?

[He throws it in the trash.]

Colonial Carl: This will do. 

Che Jim: In 2023, researchers confirmed that human footprints preserved in the mud in what's now New Mexico were as many as 23,000 years old, thousands of years before Europeans came. 

The land here teemed with life. Native villages, farms, nations, and confederations of nations.

Some groups in one place. Others moved with the seasons, and trade networks spread across the continent, connecting different nations through trails and waterways. 

Like over 1600 years ago, indigenous people living in what’s now Ohio built the Hopewell Earthworks. Enormous earthen mounds formed into precise geometric shapes, and they transported goods to the ceremonial site from all over what’s now North America. 

Like obsidian rock from what's now Idaho, and seashells and fossilised Megalodon teeth from the Gulf Coast. 

Everywhere they went, natives developed a highly specialised way of living with the land. 

Like the Ah:shiwi, or the Zuni, in what's now New Mexico, invented a way of farming in a place where it hardly rains at all using moisture trapping grids, and Hidatsa of what’s now North Dakota spent part of their year growing food on primo riverfronts. Then when the river flooded every year, they moved around and hunted, knowing the soil would be turbo boosted with nutrients by the time they returned. 

Work smarter, not harder. 

My point is, this place was lived in. There was deep active relationships between native people and the elements of the land around them. Natives managed the landscape, clearing, planting, hunting, fishing, and building.

And they knew their stuff. For example, tribal nations across the continent used fire as a tool, burning smaller patches of land to boost the growth of certain plants and prevent much larger wildfires. 

Some scholars even argue that native people even molded the environment in ways that other living things depended on. And native people depended on those living things right back. 

But then Europeans came knocking, carrying diseases that ballooned into epidemics. They also brought invasive species like rats, that had no natural predators, making life harder for native species. 

I mean, I'm not saying colonists were an invasive species, but. 

They also brought colonialism, that system where on group of people dominates and subjugates another. 

They also brought a hunger for land. As colonists kept flowing in and that hunger grew, so did efforts to remove native people from their land and claim those lands for themselves. 

Many tribes were forced into reservations, and then many of those lands were split into allotments assigned to individual tribal members. 

But allotments just shrank tribal lands further, so that non-native people could swoop in and claim more of it for their own. 

Today, at least in much of the Western world, it’s property that gets treated as sacred, not the land itself.

And because of this dominant worldview, many native communities have been separated from the land they've been in relationship with since time immemorial, including sacred sites. 

Thankfully, many native communities are reclaiming stewardship of their ancestral homelands, striving to heal places that had been harmed and care for them like they deserve to be cared for. 

For example, in the 18th and 19th centuries, over 2 million acres in what’s now New York were taken from the Onondaga nation, including Onondaga Lake.

The Onondaga consider that lake sacred, but it’s been abused, used, and polluted with toxic waste in the past hundred years. 

But in 2022, 1000 acres of that forest were put back under the Onondaga stewardship, including the headwaters of the creek that flows into that lake. 

For thousands of years, the Onondaga cared for these waters like relatives, and now they're back in the family. 

And in recent years, about one third of the land that was taken from the Báxoje, or the Iowa tribe, has been transferred back to tribal ownership.

They’ve turned the land into a tribal national park that can be used for hiking and camping, and will preserve the land and stories of the Iowa people for future generations. 

As lands return to native stewardship, populations of bison, eagles, trumpeter swans, and herring are being restored, invasive species eliminated, and habitats in grasslands, forests, and rivers revived in regions from present day Montana to Virginia. 

From a native perspective, the land is so much more than what we see and touch. It's everything. Our home, our responsibility, the source of sustenance for our bodies and spirits, and part of our identity. 

For many Native people, restoring land to native stewardship serves as an acknowledgement of native peoples ourselves, a step towards ensuring tribal sovereignty. 

For Native youth, it’s a step towards the future. Native Americans have thousands of years of experience taking care of the land, and that responsibility and knowledge gets passed on from generation to generation. 

As Iowa Tribal Vice Chairman Lance Foster said, "We've been here for a thousand years now, and unlike other people who can buy and sell land and move away, we can never move away. This is our land forever." 

Here's to the next thousand years. 

In our next episode, we're going to unpack some common aspects of Native worldviews, and I will see you then. 

Thanks for watching this episode of Crash Course: Native American History, which was filmed at our studio in Indianapolis, Indiana, and was made with the help of all these nice people. If you want to help keep Crash Course free for everyone forever, you can join our community on Patreon.